03/20/24 - I just…feel really bad for all the taxes I paid.
A blogger asks, “Why doesn’t 3/15 [Consumer Rights Protection Day in China] investigate university cafeterias?” And shows a compilation of comments talking about this topic:
“All kinds of pre-cooked food, reused oil, overnight leftovers, rotten fruit. When I’m at home and eating KFC, my mom is like, “All you ever eat is junk food!” When I’m at school and eating KFC, my mom is like, “Not bad. At least it’s nutritious.””
“Ever since I came to university, I shit myself every time I eat, like they’re putting lube in the food or something.”
“All I can say is that university cafeteria food is a whole lot dirtier than takeout.”
“Because there’s too much profit involved. They don’t dare to report about it even on 3/15. Food in university cafeterias all over the country is not that different. If one of them turns out to have problems, then the other tens of thousands of them are just as bad.”
“Can’t find a piece of real pork in the whole building.”
“Found cockroaches in my school’s soy milk. Turns out, it was because they never washed the soy milk machine, so bugs started procreating in it. That day, everyone who bought soy milk drank cockroach-infused soy milk, with crunchy cockroach bits. And the resolution is just that anyone who turns up and complains would get a refund, and people who never figured it out just got screwed. It’s like they don’t care about uni students’ health at all.”
“I’m not even joking, I even pooped blood for a lot of my university stay. Like, I was bleeding more than when I have my period. At the time, I was super shy, so I never went to a proctologist, and just waited until I graduated and eating at home fixed it.”
“Have you guys ever realised you hardly drink any water through the day at home, but you need a ton of water every time you eat at school?”
A blogger posts someone else’s social media post, reading, “Fully English murder mystery games are trending in Shanghai right now.” and comments, “That’s Shanghai for you. Even their murder mysteries are super fancy.”
OP also shows a small compilation of comments, “I don’t get it. It’s one thing to spend money on hosting a meeting after work, it’s another thing to conduct is all in English…”
“It’s just a fad. I’ve found fully Chinese murder mysteries in Melbourne. Never thought you’d find fully English murder mysteries in Shanghai. Kinda fun.”
“I wanna go, but I can’t speak English. What can I do?”
“EASA level 6, IELTS 6, TOEFL 75, and you’re qualified to play.”
Under the hashtag #I’ve become an outlaw because of the One Child Policy, a blogger writes, “I wanna tell a true story.
I was born in Jiangxi. Everyone knows, Jiangxi is infamous for its sexism.
And I was also born during the era of the One Child Policy.
But a lot of Jiangxi families wanted to have a boy no matter what it took. There was a couple like this in my distant relatives.
Both of them were born around 1960, both fairly well educated. One of them has a high school diploma, one a community college diploma, both working for the government.
They had a child, and it was a daughter.
Since everyone was saying that you had to have a son if you want dignity, they were unsatisfied. They were determined to have a son.
But they’re government workers! If they exceed their child quota, that’s not just breaking the rules, it’s being a bad example! It would absolutely not be allowed! So they had to go into hiding to have a kid.
So they stuck their daughter with some relatives to raise, while they went into hiding. In the end, they had four daughters, and both of them lost their jobs. And since the daughters were raised in hiding by their relatives, none of them were that close to their parents.
But their oldest and second oldest both had good grades. One of them ended up a doctor, and the other one works at a university as a professor.
A couple of years ago, I ran into this couple again. They were only in their 60s, but looked to be well into their 70s, at least a decade older than their peers.
When I asked about their daughters, they had tears in their eyes.
That’s when I found out that although their first two are successful, they’re no-contact with their parents. The one in university never comes home for years at a time and only occasionally sends some money. The one who’s a doctor only appears when they need to go to the hospital, with a deadpan expression, never saying a word to them.
I remarked to myself at the time, if they hadn’t been obsessed back in the day and completely ignored their daughters’ feelings, and instead put some time into properly educating and raising their kids, with their government jobs and their children’s genius…imagine how happy they would be as a family now.
When I was about to leave, I wanted to ask if they regretted it, but I didn’t. I knew that even if I didn’t ask, they had their answer. They never mention their dream of having a son anymore.
People need to be responsible for their life decisions. If you decide to have a son just because everyone is saying sons are better, or if you decide to never marry just because everyone is saying only dumbasses get married, or if you get married just because everyone is saying marriage is a necessary part of life…
I mean, people aren’t responsible for your life.”
Comments say, “Forget about back in the day. Right now, someone in my husband’s family is obsessed with having a son. She’s putting a ton of pressure on herself, taking a whole bunch of medicine in her 40s to try to get pregnant with a third baby. Thankfully, she got her wish this year. I’m pretty happy for her, that she doesn’t need to have yet another baby.”
“These daughters might have a fancy exterior because of their studies, but on the inside, they’re scarred and hurt. You need a whole lifetime to heal the damage done by your family.”
“They don’t know their own limits. I want a daughter too, but I’m out of chips to bet, so I’m not going back to the gambling table.”
New Beijing News reports, “In Hebei, Handan, a 13-year-old boy was murdered by three of his classmates. This case has drawn much continued discussion. Why would these three middle schoolers murder their classmate in such a cruel fashion? Was there existing bullying between them? All of that is still up to the justice system to investigate and try.
February of this year, Jie Jie, Director of the Ninth Procuratorate of the Supreme Court of the People said in an interview that lately, underaged crime has become a new phenomena. And statistics show that underage crime is rising, with an increase in the ratio of younger underage criminals.
Schoolyard bullying is the start of underage crime, and is a symptom of it as well. In order to manage bullying and school violence, China needs to propose a “Anti-Bullying Law” in the same vein as “Anti-Domestic Violence Laws”, to specifically address the problem of school bullying and manage it in detail, putting an end to the trend towards younger and younger criminals.”
Comments say, “But bullying doesn’t happen just at school.”
“You’re still only addressing the symptom, not the cause. Why don’t you cut it off from the root?”
“No one brought this up while the Two Sessions was in session?”
A blogger posts screenshots of two people’s social media posts, and asks, “How evil do you have to be to do this kind of shit?”
The first one is a tiktok video from Front Page News, captioned, “Woman puts unknown powder into coworker’s cup. Police say they are investigating all people involved. The victim found her water tasted funny and set up cameras in place, and discovered that someone was “adding things to her water long-term.”
A comment under this video explains, “I saw this news a couple of days ago, lemme provide some context. This woman is putting poison in a pregnant lady’s cup. The pregnant lady tasted something funny in the water and just thought her workplace had bad water quality, so she started buying bottled water to take to work, but it still tasted funny. So her friend was like, “You don’t think someone’s putting something in your water, do you?” So she started putting an iPad on top of her desk to take continuous video, and caught this woman poisoning her water. She asked this woman why, and this woman said it’s because she didn’t want the pregnant lady to take maternity leave, because then all the work will end up on her desk instead. She doesn’t want to do all that work. She even said that a different lady in that office had gotten pregnant before and randomly had a miscarriage twice. Had a baby as soon as she went to work in a different office. This other lady heard the news and called the police, and felt like her previous miscarriages had something to do with this woman.”
The second one is a post asking for advice, “Help! Someone’s putting salt in my milk! I want to get it tested!
I’m a breastfeeding-only mom. I pump and store my milk at work. There’s not a lot of people in my office, just 5 including me, and we’re all women. So I put my work in the fridge at the office and take it home every 2-3 days. Since I was in a hurry to go to lunch yesterday and everyone was waiting on me, I didn’t put my milk from noon into the milk and just left it on the table, figuring I can bag it once I got back to the office.
Thank god I did that, because when I was done eating, I discovered weird crystals in my milk. At first, I thought it was just bubbles, but there was a lot of it. It didn’t look normal. I touched it with my fingers, and it felt grainy, so I tasted it and found it was salt. I tasted the milk too, and it was salty. I was horrified! Someone was putting salt in my milk!
And then I started thinking back on my frozen milk in the past couple of months. The first month I came back to work, my milk was normal, but then later on, my milk bags would get bloated, like air would get inside. I even asked my husband, “Why would milk bags get bloated when I use them at work?” And my husband thought maybe our fridge wasn’t cold enough or something, and I believed him since it was super old. I usually feed this kind of milk to my baby right away, since I feel like it’d be a shame to throw it away, and almost all of my bags of milk was having this problem, and I didn’t have enough milk to spare if I tossed all of them.
And then I remembered I still had two bloated bags in my fridge, so I went to taste them just in case, and they were horrifyingly salty too! Oh my god! Someone has been putting salt in my milk for a long time!
So I called the police, made a statement, but they won’t open a case. The police said that there’s no security cameras, so there’s no evidence. They won’t even run any tests on the milk and told me I have to do that on my own. I’m just totally lost.
I took my baby to the ER last night. I was worried sick about the baby’s kidneys and stuff drinking that much salt over time. She’s only 7 months old!! I feel so awful I want to die. Why would I be so careless? If something happened to my baby, I’d throw myself off of a building too. The doctors suggested my baby go into the ICU right away for observation and get a full checkup. The results came out today, and she seems to be fine. They’ll transfer her to a normal room tomorrow.
Now I just want to ask if anyone knows anywhere I can take my milk to get tested? The hospital wouldn’t run tests either. I’m worried what else might be in it other than salt.
After this shit happened, it’s like I see the world in a whole different way. I always think the best of people. Of the 5 people in my office, four of us get along great. We hang out every day, eat with each other, talk about everything. There’s a woman nobody gets along with, but she’s well into her 50s. I thought the worst she’d do is badmouth me to my boss. It’s not like we’re competing against each other or anything! Now I feel like anyone could be the culprit. Like, the more I think about it, the more scared I get. Why would anyone go after a little baby? What an absolute dearth of humanity!
I’ll post a photo of my baby’s test results. Some people think I’m just making this up for attention or something. I’m pretty calm right now. When I figured this out, my first reaction wasn’t anger. It was worry and stress. The whole time I was giving my statement in the police station, I was asking the cops when I could go. I wanted to hurry home to my baby and take her to the hospital. The police didn’t even give me a case number or anything.”
OP also attaches some comments, “Anyone with kids going to school, remember to buy your kid a fingerprint-locked thermos! Kids are evil too! When I was in high school, someone put laundry soap and lye in my classroom’s water dispenser, and gave a lot of students throat inflammation. The culprit was caught on camera, and he just wanted the whole class to get sick or die, so he’d get a couple of days off of school. He picked a day when we had PE to poison the water because he knew everyone would drink a lot!”
“When I was pregnant, someone in my office suddenly started diffusing perfume. There was all kinds of fragrances floating around the room. You can’t say she’s evil, since she didn’t do anything that overt. But god, was it annoying.”
“The person putting salt in milk most likely has a baby themselves, since a lot of people don’t know that babies can’t eat salt.”
“Reposting: After a while, once the attention of the internet shifts somewhere else, these three murderers will be released since they’re underage minors. They’ll continue to live their lives and grow up, and maybe marry one of you guys’ daughters as wives. They could be your customer, or your coworker, or your friend, or the guy next to you in the train, or a neighbour, or a delivery driver…they’ll always remember the thrill of murdering someone and not having to take responsibility for it back when they were a teenager.”
“The more you think about it, the scarier it gets. In my previous workplace, all my female coworkers couldn’t get pregnant, but they get pregnant right away if they quit or get transferred to a different office. Or they’d get pregnant in my office, and there’d be something wrong with the baby every time. One had a heart defect, the other one was deaf in the right ear. We all thought it was because we had bad feng shui or something. But now that I think about it, my female boss was infertile, and her husband divorced her to have kids with other women, so she’s super mean to the pregnant women. She’d make them carry heavy stuff, refuse to pay them their stipends, force them to work unpaid overtime outside in the heat or cold, make them wait until their water’s broken before they can leave work…it’s so scary!”
“When you’re little, you need to beware of being murdered by your bullies. When you’re in university, you need to beware of your roommates poisoning you. When you’re dating, you need to beware of being murdered by pursuers you turned down. When you’re working, you need to beware of coworkers poisoning you. When you’re getting takeout, you need to beware of delivery drivers stabbing you because your food was late. When you’re old, you need to beware of never getting to retire. Basically, just one sentence, “Make money, learn martial arts, never have kids,” and you can save yourself so much trouble.”
“Do kids have to take their parents’ surnames?
Taking little Mickey with us overseas for the first time [OP’s son]. While we’re in the airport, the worker there stared at our passports for the longest time and asked, “What relation does this kid have with you?”
We laughed, like, “We’re his parents. He just doesn’t have our surnames.”
And the worker quietly went, “…oh,” and stamped our passports.
Now that I recall, back when we bought cruise tickets, the cruise ship even demanded we provide birth certificates and hukou registration once they saw our info…”
Comments say, “They don’t have to. They can absolutely take your neighbour’s surname.”
“Article 1015 of the People’s Republic of China Civil Code: A natural person shall follow his father or his mother’s last name, but in the following circumstances, they can choose a different surname: 1) They may choose the surname of a different, directly-related elder; 2) If they were raised by someone other than their legal guardian, they may choose the surname of whoever raised them; 3) Other legitimate reasons that do not violate public order and custom. Ethnic minorities can take surnames that are culturally significant to them…”
“I’ve got a classmate who doesn’t have the same surname as his mom or dad.”
“Supposedly, this is the photo of a wife and concubine in a prominent house in the Qing Dynasty. Can you tell which is which?”
Comments say, “Based on their outfits, I’d guess left is the wife. Based on the way they carry themselves, I’d guess right.”
“Back in the day, only ladies of prominent houses would bind their feet. You can’t work at all, so only a rich family could afford you.”
“The right side is the wife. Although the husband clearly favours the concubine so her clothing is shabbier, you can tell just by the way she carries herself that she’s more legitimate. Her son’s standing behind her too. The one on the right is the concubine, wearing new clothes, and still jealous enough to turn her head and glare.”
A compilation of why “You can only see the benefits of being a civil servant after you’re 35.”
“As soon as you have a kid, it’ll be obvious.”
“You won’t get laid off as you age—that’s the true value. By the time you’re middle-aged, you’ve got little ones on one hand and old people on the other. A layoff would be a nightmare.”
“I’ve got a male coworker who was sick and “resting at home” for almost two and a half years. That whole time, he got his normal salary, just as if he was coming to work.”
“I get paid 120K a year, 2500 in my 401K [not sure, but I think this is meant to be per month?] 9AM to 5PM. I get in the office in the morning and just play on my phone until lunch. Then I eat and go back home, or take a nap in my office. Go back to work at 2:30PM and keep playing on my phone until it’s time for me to leave. Every day, I just worry about what I’m gonna have for dinner. My day is basically over the minute I open my eyes in the morning. I spend one day sleeping in and one day playing ball on the weekends. Every day’s been the same for years.”
“There’s a guy in my office who had a brain bleed and he basically can’t use his hands at all. He’s stopped coming to work and he’s still getting paid the same. Can you get that in any corporation?”
“I got a government job as soon as I graduated and have worked 8 years. I got 14 classes a week, a little over 10K in pay a month. I’m so bored, I’ve ran out of games to play, because I’m just sick of everything already. The best part is, I still have summer and winter break.”
“A deputy director’s son got some rare disease and went to Beijing to get it treated. He hasn’t come into work for 2.5 months. Can you do that at any normal company?”
“This young teacher born in 1999 came to my school a while back, and after the first semester, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Since then, she’s been getting treatment and hasn’t come into work for over a year. She’s still getting pay. She’s still getting bonuses. She’s not getting fined for taking time off work. By the time I saw her again, she was in the logistics department, and just takes care of inventory. Did that until she was 55. Super stable. 6000+ RMB a month at least. She is always saying, “Thank God I have a government job, or I don’t know what I would’ve done.””
“When you start working, you’ll know how great it is to only work 4-6 hours a day.”
“I started feeling it since I got pregnant. I took a lot of time off of work since I had a risky pregnancy. I only went back to work after 6 months. I feel like if I wasn’t a civil servant, I would’ve been replaced already. But since I was a civil servant, I got to keep my pay, and as soon as I came back, my workplace fired the temp worker they found to replace me.”
Comments say, “I just…feel really bad for all the taxes I paid.”
“All of this is such obviously made up bullshit.”
“If you have a government job, you do have more healthcare benefits, but don’t even think about a 9-5 work day with weekends off. For a lot of bottom-level workers, it’s mostly promise you’ll have to work on Saturday, promise you won’t get rest on Sunday, with lots of overtime every day. And it’s all unpaid.”
coworker’s cut -> coworker’s cup
“…Chinese murder mysteries in Melbourne” - yep.